Who Owns Your News?

The tl;dr

If you don’t know who owns your news outlets, then you’re getting propagandized to and you will not be well-informed.

Key points

• Every news outlet reflects the goals, biases, and motivations of its owners.
• Most media outlets are either directly owned or indirectly controlled by billionaires and oligarchs.
• Those outlets therefore reflect the goals, biases, and motivations of the billionaires and oligarchs who own them.
• If you don’t know who the owner of a news outlet is, then you don’t know whose motivations are being represented by that outlet, and you are leaving yourself open to manipulation.
• You are not “too smart” to be fooled by respectable-seeming news outlets with a hidden agenda. No one is.
• Finding out who owns a given news outlet is super easy, barely an inconvenience. For all the big ones, you can just look at Wikipedia, and trace their ownership up the chain to their parent company (or family, or individual). For smaller outlets, try checking out their website.
• Protect yourself: Get in the habit of looking into who owns a news source before reading any news they produce.

Necessarily the News

We’ve all had a blind spot for a long time: We believed that The News was respectable, simply because it was… The News. Sure, big news outlets—papers like the New York Times, national TV news broadcasts like NBC, cable news like CNN—didn’t always get everything right, and didn’t always exactly share our political views. But it’s The News. Surely those major, professional outlets are an okay place to get news from. Right? They wouldn’t deliberately misrepresent reality in order to support the goals of their billionaire owners… right?

Regardless of your place on any political spectrum, it’s easy to see that if you don’t know who owns the news you consume, you’re leaving yourself wide open to effectively invisible manipulation. Sure, knowing who the owners are doesn’t magically immunize you against manipulation; but at least once you know, you can figure out what the owners want, and view their news stories in that context.

This means that if you’re only getting your news from one or two sources, then you’re only getting a very limited view of things. You’re only seeing the kinds of stories those sources want to tell, and only from the perspectives of those sources. Spreading your news consumption around is critical if you want to be well-informed.

Yes, it’s work. But if you’re not doing it, then what you’re getting isn’t broad and accurate. It’s focused propaganda, and you’re not even aware of it. Knowing who owns your news, and getting your news from multiple independent sources, is the only way to have a chance to get the full picture.

All news—all human communication of any kind—has some amount of implicit bias. That’s okay! The problem isn’t that we get our news from sources that have bias. The problem is when we don’t know what that bias is, or worse, think there is no bias.

And getting all your news from sources with the same biases—for example, sources all owned by billionaires—is just as dangerous. Ideally you want news from multiple sources with different biases. One source might run stories about topics another source won’t touch. Some sources provide context for events, while others act as little more than stenographers for official press releases.

Trusting the Big Names in news to keep us informed hasn’t worked out. It’s up to all of us to take an active hand in being well-informed, and knowing who owns your news is the first step.